A 500-pound weight off a town clerk's back

MariAn Gail Brown

Updated 12:42 am, Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Monroe Town Clerk Marsha Beno holds one of the town's old record books. Her department is running out of space in its vault. With a grant from the Connecticut State Library's Connecticut Document Preservation Program, the Monroe Town Clerk is having these weighty volumes copied and rebound to take up about 33 percent less space, giving her department more storage space and patrons more elbow room to work.
Photo: MariAn Gail Brown

Volumes of Monroe's weighty land records lay on a table in the town clerk's vault stacked in neat rows that are at least 2 feet high. They chronicle the buying and selling of property, easements, deeds and mortgages.

Sometimes, they tell a soap opera of how a pre-colonial home gets passed down from one generation to the next or how a large tract is carved up (not always in equal shares) among the owner's sons and daughters.

Fifty three volumes of Monroe's land records are going on a road trip.

"We've received a $4,000 grant from the Connecticut State Library's Document Preservation Program that will accomplish something our office really needs to do," Marsha Beno, Monroe's town clerk, said. "We're running out of physical space to store all the records we keep. And this will create more room because when these records come back, they'll be reproduced in smaller form."

The thick hundreds-page long cloth-bound books, which weigh almost 10 pounds apiece, are headed to the Adkins Printing Co. in New Britain to be scanned, shrunk and bound in volumes that can snap open similar to a loose leaf binder so that individual pages can be removed and duplicated on ordinary office copy machines. The big bound books Monroe has are unwieldy to maneuver and don't fit on standard office copiers without a lot of manipulation. Sometimes, it even takes two people.

The price tag for Adkins to shrink-copy these tomes is $4,160, which means that Monroe will only have to kick in $160 for the job. The volumes headed to New Britain cover the years 1929 through 1963 -- an event-packed era from the Depression through the Cold War, housing busts and booms, and the exodus of families from cities to the suburbs.

Kathy Maillet, an appraiser with the Maillet Appraisal Group in Shelton, visits dozens of town clerks' offices regularly to review deeds and property descriptions for lenders reviewing mortgage applications.

"They're really running out of space in these vaults at many of the Connecticut town clerks' offices I go to," Maillet said. "Sometimes, it's hard to find the books because they've got these rows and rows of these sliding bookcases, and you have to keep maneuvering one in front of the other until you can reach what you're looking for."

The worst, Maillet said, is the vault in New Fairfield, in one of the northern most reaches of Fairfield County. "It's tiny. Tiny, tiny," she said.

Janice Zackeo, New Fairfield's town clerk, acknowledges the dubious distinction.

Zackeo , her office has applied for the Connecticut State Library's document preservation grant each year since 2007. When the old oversized volumes are returned, Zackeo said they go "to historical societies."